British Quilters’ Guild Collection
Detail, silk patchwork quilt dated 1718 found in Aldbourne,
England in Wiltshire, about 75 miles west of London,
showing English patchwork tradition,
quite familiar to the American eye.
At a time when bigots and pseudo-scientists emphasized difference in world cultures by gathering evidence in head shapes and facial characteristics....
Phrenologist measuring potential, Frank Dadd,1882
1902
...Faddish misinformation became the "scientific" support of much bigotry.
In the midst of misinformation about potential and racially-inherited character, one could find many observable differences in U.S. regional customs and folkways. Nature rather than nurture was the popular theory explaining variety in living styles such as food choices, agriculture and how a home was set up and furnished. We now look more to "nurture' believing it's culture rather than genetics that dictates ideas as to whether pork is edible and how the bed was made.
Bedding and beds (our emphasis here) were quite diverse.
Museum Kastenbett
Traditional Austrian bed in a cabinet
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Embroidered bedcover, a colcha, signed & dated 1786 by
Rosa SolÃs y Menéndez of Mexico
Nederlands Openlucht Museum
Dutch doll quilt, 18" wide, about 1800
Before 1800 patchwork bedding was not a common international solution to keeping warm at night. We could generalize and say the earlier pieced quilts were a product of the Netherlands and the British Isles, early colonizers of North America. The Dutch who sold their east coast real estate early to the English are often forgotten as patchworkers with most credit going to
New England's crafters, descendants of the English refugees of the 17th century. New Englanders were ready to assemble scraps of cotton into bedding as soon as cotton scraps became common on both sides of the Atlantic in the last quarter of the 18th century.
Other immigrant groups and colonizers such as the French in Louisiana, the Pennsylvania Germans and the Californios had few pre-1830 traditions of patchwork bedding. Their descendants adopted patchwork from British neighbors.
Freeman Auction
Quilt associated with the Vickers and Dare families, Maryland,
dated 1845 a year before war with Mexico was declared.
1840s innovations included red and green color schemes
and signed blocks assembled into patchwork albums.
In the last posts we looked at patchwork ideas during the 1840s, the decade of the Mexican War, when jingoistic ideas were used to make an argument for taking the vast southwest from Mexico. Americans were superior to Mexicans due to elite British genetics and culture. Patchwork quilts fit neatly into this hierarchy as they derived from a bedding style most associated with the British.
Lovely Lane Museum
1848, Baltimore
Mid-19th century political attitudes may have influenced the look of quilts---it's tough to find the threads of cause and effect. But the attitude certainly affected the way we look at quilts into the present day.
New Englander Harriet Beecher Stowe had much to do with quilts' association with English virtues and New England social life. In her 1859 novel The Minister's Wooing a quilting party is a major event. She had praise for the thrifty good wives of New England who created "stores of beauty and utility" in patchwork spreads. And praise for the descendants of Puritans with their Puritan educations and "solemn Puritan dwellings."
Stars in an 1844 sampler from Bangor, Maine
Of her heroine: "Mary had at heart the Puritan seed of heroism—never absent from the souls of true New England women." New Englanders were also Anglo-Saxons: Mary had an "Anglo-Saxon constitution, with its strong, firm intensity, its singleness of nature, wonders at the mobile, many-sided existence of warmer races...."
"The Minster's Wooing" was serialized in the Atlantic Monthly, a magazine founded in 1857 to advance what the New England founders called "The American Idea," from the region they consider the Olympus of U.S. culture. Stowe's initial serial novel contributed to that mythification, noted Joan D. Hedrick in her Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Stowe:
Colonial couple imagined in the 1940s
If one is going to believe in elite hierarchies, one also sees hierarchies within the social ladder. Anglo-Saxons were apparently the elite of the elite.
That attitude was summarized in a mid-1840s endorsement for war hero Winfield Scott, "the very fellow for the head of [Mexican] government... Mexico will soon be Anglo-Saxonized." Not just Americanized or Britishized but Anglo-Saxonized. Take that you Celts and Normans, etc.!
1868 Virginia editorial looking back at
Anglo-Saxon triumph in the Mexican War
Mexican War veterans First Lieutenant Pierre G.T. Beauregard and Major John Charles Frémont might disagree.
Anglo-Saxon quilts in the 14th & 15th centuries in
rather sloppy popular history from 1884.
Readers would assume that Anglo-Saxons supplied
servants with the old patchwork quilt typical of the 1880s.
Quilt patterns and fabrics were designed to celebrate the connections. Most familiar may be what we still call a Lone Star, the symbol of the Texas Republic. See the last post:
Lone Star quilt with a Mexican War battle scene chintz
International Quilt Museum,
Byron & Sara Rhodes Dillow Collection
Ruth Finley's chronology of politics is suspect but to her we owe
a good many of our ideas about pattern names and their supposed meaning.
Quilt date-inscribed 1832 & signed by Eunice Bailey
What did quilters of Eunice's time call this pattern?
Ruth Finley professed to know a century later.
It's unsettling to see a craft used to support white/Anglo-Saxon supremacy but that connection became the standard verbiage, which tends to increase in intensity during periods of immigration from non-British countries.
In the early to mid-20th century popular quilt writing was valued more for mythology than accuracy. Nostalgia for an imagined colonial and pioneer past fed a sense of national pride. Patchwork quilts were survivors that seemed to support that argument. Curators, popular historians and pattern companies shaped their stories to fit the myth.
1934 Chicago Tribune
The fictional Nancy Cabot of the Chicago Tribune's quilt column was among the most fanciful of history writers. This pattern---an heirloom of the English colonist? unlikely---but a genteel association that at base is rather insidious.
Illustrations from The New Physiognomy by Samuel Wells
Too bad for you Scandinavians--- frankly, it's your chins.
Anglo-Saxons were, according to Anglo-Saxons, the apex of human development.
1826 lecture, Henry Thomas Alken
These three posts on the Anglo-Saxon quilt give us a little insight into our accepted versions of quilt history and why quilts are so pervasively associated with American identity. We aren't going to change the negative aspects of that but at least we can get a glimpse of why it's so.
